


Come Put out the Fire on Us

by marauders_groupie



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - War, Angst, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, sort of WWI but not quite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-10
Updated: 2015-10-10
Packaged: 2018-04-25 19:04:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4972774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauders_groupie/pseuds/marauders_groupie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They sent a boy with hope and humor in his eyes to war, and he returned as a man whose shoulders are tired of carrying the weight of the world.</p><p>For <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/lushatrocity/pseuds/lushatrocity">lushatrocity</a> who suggested a period piece, with a husband returning from the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Put out the Fire on Us

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lushatrocity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lushatrocity/gifts).



> Reading this, you'll probably realize that I didn't specify which war this was. To be honest, I had a vague idea of making it about WWI but didn't want to go into details, so there's that. Also, the place is London but not quite? Yeah, it's all a bit vague so - sorry. I hope you'll find it in your hearts to forgive me, and I hope this disclaimer won't put you off from reading.
> 
> The Title is from Cold War Kids - Hospital Beds.
> 
> That being said, read on and enjoy!

War is a conflict carried on by force of arms, as between nations or between parties within a nation; warfare, as by land, sea, or air.

Or so the definition says.

In reality, Clarke Griffin knows, war is bloodshed and robbery. People die for the goals of leaders safely tucked inside their bunkers, so that someone else might get the chance to steal whatever is left after the dust has settled, so that men in expensive suits and women with pearls gracing their collarbones don’t have to dirty their hands with other people’s blood.

War is destruction, even before bombs hit their targets, even before the first soldier falls down on the damp soil that once gave him life and it is only natural that it should take it. But death with cannons ringing in your ears and your shirt soaked with blood isn’t natural. It is manmade, and whoever considers it to be anything other than a product of our own, human hands is either a liar or a fool.

It all starts with thousands of body bags being ordered and Clarke looks at her mother in disbelief, the woman’s words falling from her lips like they are absolutely ordinary and expected.

“You’re ordering body bags?”

Abby Griffin looks at her daughter with a mixture of irritation and sadness in her pursed lips. “What did you expect, Clarke?”

Not that, never that. She knows that people die so that someone else can live, knows about blood running red and hot down the streets of Paris after the revolutionaries broke into Bastille, knows about the Balkans – constantly alit with flames, she’s read her history books, soaked up the knowledge, but – this, this she wasn’t expecting.

Maybe it is because she is twenty-one and doesn’t know anything about the real world. Bellamy tells her so when she’s tucked into his side, fire crackling in the fireplace in front of them, and he tries to be gentle but his words hurt nevertheless.

“I know, Bell, I do.”

He nods, his warm, solid hand coming to lean on her waist and they sit there, unblinking, as the radio relays the news of new battlefields being opened and tallies the body count.

It only gets worse, every single day, orphans in the streets, their faces covered with ash and soot and grime, lingering in dark corners children shouldn’t ever have to see. Clarke stops to talk to them, invites them home and feeds them, but there is only so much she can do with her two hands.

Then Bellamy gets enlisted and she begs her mother to do something, do anything – he is her husband and he should be spared. It disgusts her to no end, that she can ask that and so many wives can’t, but she is still desperate and furious and he is the one thing she can’t stand losing.

“I can’t do that.”

Clarke goes back home to him and they spend the night slumped against the wall in their kitchen, wailing coming from the streets and only the flickering of candles arranged around the room illuminating their faces. His freckles dance under the light and she loves him, loves him so much her heart might burst at the seams.

The next morning his uniform is crisp and olive green and she grabs him by the lapels, presses her lips against his. There is so much she wants to say, the first thing being –

“You’re not going. We’ll think of something, we – we always think of something.”

His eyes are glistening with tears that always come when you don’t know if you’re going to see someone who means the world to you again. “Not this time, Princess. Not this time.”

It’s a running gag, the nickname – since the night they first met. He was a promising intern, working for Marcus Kane, and he looked as bored as she was when they had to attend a banquet to celebrate something completely unimportant.

“You want to get out of here?” she asks him, leaning against the wall with her shoulder and peering at him. He feels like a breath of fresh air amidst the smell of champagne and freshly ironed frocks.

“Are princesses allowed to run away?” he smirks, and she thinks she wants to see it for the rest of her life.

“Not usually,” Clarke retorts. “But I’ll make an exception.”

They are married within three months and she’s never been so sure of anything in her whole life. Bellamy Blake, with his sharp mind, quick wit and soft gaze whenever she’s around – Bellamy Blake, with his spiteful tongue, childish joy when they dance in their kitchen, lips and hands that make her body sing when he’s near. Bellamy Blake, the love of her life even if she is only twenty-one but she still can’t un-know it.

He leaves, throwing a glance full of so many things they could spend years saying – intended to spend years saying, and she tries to smile but she can’t.

Clarke makes it through two months, waits by the door for Bellamy’s letters to arrive, and makes friends with the women in her street doing the same. There is a strong sense of camaraderie between the women whose husbands, brothers, and sons had been shipped off to die for another man’s cause. There is steel in their eyes and their red lips are war paint, heads held high as if to say – you can break my heart, but you won’t take my soul.

She nearly becomes a shadow of the girl she once was but the women who invite her for tea don’t let her, Octavia doesn’t let her. Bellamy’s sister is there every other afternoon, carrying cookies she made with what little flour she managed to get, bringing smiles and joy and light into dreary afternoons.

Clarke doesn’t talk to her mother because – what could she say? What does she have to say to the woman who sent her husband to die, and then did the same to her daughter’s? She doesn’t want Clarke to be a part of this war, but she wants her husband to.

Finally, the world is going to hell, with people’s faces turning ashen, the flames in their eyes extinguished, children crying and women begging. This is what the world is, hurt and suffering and pain no one cares about as long as someone is dying for nothing at all.

Bellamy writes whenever he can, long letters in his precise cursive. He was always the one who was good with words – Clarke thinks he could incite a revolution without batting an eyelid, if only he’d wanted to. The two of them were always too hopeful for their own good, and the world always loved destroying children who wanted to change it.

He tells her how much he misses her, how much he loves her – doesn’t talk about people dying, ground covered in blood and rubble, sounds of the war he has to fight. He doesn’t talk about anything except his love for her and Octavia, how much they mean to him, and he never says that he is writing it because he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get the chance to again but Clarke can still read it between the lines.

The bed is cold without him at night, she is cold without him every second of the day and his letters are ripped at the edges because she reads them whenever she can, reads them until she can’t see anything but his words when she closes her eyes at night.

When he stops replying to her letters, she doesn’t stop writing. She doesn’t stop writing because he has to be somewhere out there, has to be alive and has to know that she loves him no matter what happens.

Months pass and there are still no letters. She picks herself up from the floor, curls her hair and dons her best suit. Abby looks like she’s been waiting for her and Clarke wants to slap her and hug her, tell her how much she misses her and how much she hates her.

She does nothing, only asks “Where is Bellamy?” because this is the one thing she demands of her mother. There is a wounded look in Abby’s eyes when Clarke doesn’t answer to any of her questions, just needs this one bit of information.

“He’s still alive.”

Clarke nods, gets up from the sofa where she first learned how to read. The house is cold and huge and it’s not a home anymore. “Thank you.”

The next morning, she calls Octavia and when the girl arrives, the defiant set of their jaws match – the relentlessness they possess courses through both of their bodies and there is a pact made in blue and green eyes.

No more standing around, no more waiting for this all to end because Clarke will shatter herself to pieces if she has to stand still – ignorant of all the pain she can taste in the air. There is no rain, no sun, no wind, no snow – it’s all gray and ruined, burned land where war touches it.

Clarke and Bellamy’s bedroom makes way for what reminisces of a hospital room, five beds she traded her weeks’ worth of food for. There are still medical supplies cluttering her cupboards, something Bellamy used to laugh about, and Octavia brings gauze and whatever else she manages to find – she doesn’t tell Clarke how she did it, and Clarke doesn’t ask.

People start knocking at her door at any time of the day, she made it clear that anyone who needs help will be welcomed here. She can’t be on the battlefield, can’t take care of wounded soldiers’ gashes and bullets lodged into their muscles, but she can do this – she can accept the women with horrible coughs, children whose eyesight is weakened by the bad quality of air they breathe.

A spark is reignited in her and she promises herself that she would not go down without a fight. She can’t carry a rifle, but she can do this.

Octavia is a constant, reassuring presence at her side – the girl who looks so much like Bellamy Clarke’s heart hurts whenever she sets her eyes on her. Later, it only swells with pride and love when Octavia knows what to do to bandage someone’s cut arm – the women have to work in factories now, long hours in exchange for a piece of bread that is going to keep them and their children alive. No one cares if their brittle bones are smashed by heavy machinery or if their souls are broken by the time they fall into their beds at the end of the day.

“You’ll be fine,” Octavia assures them, something about her so vivid and alive that it gives space for kindness and bravery to bloom. Children smile at her when she tells them a joke while Clarke is trying to assess the real damage of their poor diets, with their mothers crying because they haven’t seen their children laugh a very long time.

No one remembers what happiness feels like anymore. There is just dread and hopelessness now.

They get a quiet night from time to time and they are too tired to eat or sleep so they sit around the kitchen table, drinking tea and listening to the radio. The dead are gone and the living are hungry, but no one cares for that.

“Were there any-“

Octavia shakes her head. “No.”

She knows what Clarke was going to ask, but spares her the desperation of saying his name and letting it linger in the air between them. No letters come in the months that follow but both of them still jump whenever they hear the clang of the opening in the doors for the post.

Octavia doesn’t bother going home most of the time, just shrugs and curls up to Clarke on the couch. Their clothes grow dirty, the white washed away and turning to the same shade of the sky that promises more bloodshed, and with such a cultivated carelessness it takes away their breaths.

Abby comes one day, months after they started out. People are still coming, mostly women and children but there are men too – men deemed too wounded to fight, sent back home. Clarke wonders if the emptiness in their eyes comes from already seeing too much or from not being able to live like nothing happened. Their bones ache but they never wince when she stabs their skin with needles.

“You have to stop doing this, Clarke,” her mother warns, standing in the middle of what was once a living room and is now an improvised operation room. She looks disgusted and worried, but Clarke can’t forget the shake of her head when she begged her to let Bellamy stay.

“No.”

“Clarke, people have started talking. You can’t do this,” she motions towards the trousers Clarke is wearing, brown and warm and Bellamy’s - the only thing she has left to wear. “It’s not appropriate for a woman to-“

“Is it appropriate for a woman to send men off to die?” Clarke retorts, the bite she expected to be in her voice nonexistent. She is tired of talking to her mother when there are people waiting and Octavia can only do so little to help them. “You were a doctor once, too. Didn’t you promise to save lives?”

Abby leaves and nothing lingers in the air except for the smell of rust, thick and heavy. They mind a woman wearing trousers, but they don’t mind women’s fingers being broken and their souls crushed under the heavy weight of having to live their lives when the other part of their soul may die in any moment.

The worst thing is, Clarke decides one night when she can’t sleep (and when can she?), not knowing. Bellamy might be alive, gritted teeth and defiant jaw Octavia wears every day, or he might be dead, cold and lifeless in a trench – like so many men of his age.

She throws herself into helping others when she can’t help those on the battlefields, wears her fury like a second skin when it has replaced sadness and washes off the blood from her hands at the end of the day.

“At least you can wash it off,” Octavia whispers at the crack of dawn in the kitchen. It’s just plates and mugs, coffee grounds and wet rags. They aren’t much more than that. “Those who sent them to die can’t.”

It’s no comfort, but the people don’t know the meaning of it anymore. Clarke’s body is sharp where it was once soft, her eyes are adamant where they were passionate, and her soft pillow only serves to remind her that everything else is very much unlike it. She forgoes comfort for survival, the only thing they can do.

She hasn’t smiled in weeks but the sight of Octavia and a foreign soldier with their heads bowed together in the early morning, brilliant sun filtering into the room, brings a smile to her face and she knows that there is still good in the world. There is still good in the world, as long as Octavia can find the strength to smile when the man’s soft gaze is resting on her features.

This is how they cope, this is how they survive.

“His name is Lincoln,” Octavia tells her one day, her smile wider than Clarke had ever seen it. “He’s from Paris.”

She doesn’t say much more but she doesn’t have to. Clarke recognizes the glimmer in her eyes when she speaks of him, sees how her hands are tender with his bruised ribs and aching bones, cries when she sees them kiss on the last day of his stay.

“Thank you,” Clarke tells him later, escorting him through the door.

It’s only when he speaks that she realizes she hadn’t heard him before. “What for?”

“For Octavia, for making her smile, for-“her voice cracks and the warmth of her tears is comforting and hellish at the same time. “For, you know, some good in this world.”

Lincoln nods, understanding, and thanks her for taking care of him. He is back the next day, and the day after that, carrying small gifts of bread and antiseptics – things that they need. There is no place for flowers in this life, not anymore, but she swears there are some blooming when Octavia sits her down and clears her throat.

“Lincoln’s asked me to marry him.”

Clarke doesn’t know what victory feels like, but she’s pretty sure that the somersault her heart makes at the news is the closest thing to it.

She and Octavia cry, cry well into the night, leaning against one another, happy and tired and sad and relieved. There are so many things that could go wrong and Bellamy still isn’t here, still can’t write, but there is this one little good thing and it feels like a miracle.

Their vows are short and the ceremony is rushed but Clarke is thankful. Thankful for the world allowing Octavia to be happy, even if it’s bittersweet and not quite there. It’s still something.

There are news of the war coming to an end, soon. Clarke prays for it every morning and every night, and prays even harder for those who have to live through what happens next.

She is not sure whether they even remember what happiness is anymore.

 

* * *

 

 

They sent a boy with hope and humor in his eyes to war, and he returned as a man whose shoulders are tired of carrying the weight of the world.

The morning Bellamy comes home is the rainiest one yet. Octavia and Lincoln arrive on time and they distribute tasks between the three of them. Lincoln isn’t a doctor, doesn’t have medical education like Clarke does but he knows a lot from having to stop his friends from bleeding out one too many times.

He’s kind and he’s generous, Octavia laughs more than she ever has, and Clarke is mostly thankful for the silent man who brought some happiness into their lives.

Lincoln is the one who opens the door, Clarke asking him to because she is elbows-deep in washing the plates in the kitchen and Octavia is busy talking to a pregnant woman with two kids in tow. There is more food these days and Clarke gets more than she could eat so they decide to serve breakfast to people, too. Lunch and dinner if they can manage. Anything that can help.

The war is coming to an end, all the gunpowder spent, so many dead that the living already trip on them on the vast fields predetermined for carnage. The world has grown tired of it, the losses are being counted in millions, but that’s only the dead. Those who survived are gone, too.

She hears Lincoln from the hallway, a barely noticeable French accent. “Uh, Clarke?”

“What is it?”

“Someone is looking for you.”

There is a tinge of uncertainty in his voice and Clarke frowns at the plates, wiping her hands on her apron. A lot of people have been looking for her in the past two years, but there is something unsettling in the way Lincoln said it and she carefully steps out in the hallway.

She barely recognizes him, her stomach plummeting and her body suddenly numb and vibrant at the same time. He has a beard now, a rough, ragged thing – much like his eyes. It’s his eyes that she recognizes the last – they are nothing like they were the last time she’d seen him but she still cries out and throws herself into his arms.

Bellamy, Bellamy is alive and her heart sings with joy she forgot about and could only taste in the smallest amounts while he was gone.

He is solid and warm under her hands, his lips are chapped but she knows the taste of him – everything is like coming back home and she doesn’t know if she’s sad or happy – both, both, her mind supplies – because she feels everything at once and this is what flying feels like.

There are tears streaming down her face when they break apart and she’s aware of the rough wool of his sweater chafing her cheeks, aware of his hair that smells like the cold wind freezing them to the bone but underneath everything, he is hers and she is his.

Her heart wasn’t beating until then, she knows suddenly. Her blood didn’t flow so freely. Nothing compared to him next to her, alive and bruised and tired, but there.

“Clarke.”

His voice is hoarse but it’s filled with emotion she can’t express in any other way than to press her lips against his again. She wants nothing else but to melt into him, two halves of a whole like they’d always been.

“Clarke, God, I missed you so much,” he buries his head into her hair and she wraps her arms around his waist. She can feel his ribs poking through his skin and she’s sad, but then she’s euphoric again because he fits with her and hope had felt like a forbidden thing until now.

She repeats his name a hundred times, but it won’t ever be enough.

“You’re home. Bellamy, you’re home, you’re-“

Her throat is tightening and there are tears again but he’s nodding, he knows. He already knows what she wants to say and words seem so unnecessary.

Octavia is sobbing when she sees him, a tray she’d been carrying clatters to the floor, and then his arms are around her and Clarke knows that Lincoln is happy as she is, they wear matching smiles they didn’t dare to wear before.

There is something different about him but he’s Bellamy all the same.

The three of them walk him through the house, Octavia chatting away and Clarke holding his hand. He’s thinner than he was when he left, she can feel his bones underneath his skin but she holds on tight because she’s afraid that she didn’t deserve this happiness and it will be taken from her.

“You two were busy,” he finally says with a wry smile. Then he turns to look at Clarke and she startles when she realizes that she’s forgotten what he looks like when he beams at her, dimples in his cheeks and his chin. “I’m so proud of you.”

“No, this is – this is nothing.”

“This is everything,” Lincoln says, drawing everyone’s attention. “This means a lot to people, Clarke.”

Bellamy smiles at him and then he frowns. “Excuse me, who are you?”

The laughter that interrupts the stunned silence feels like letting go of the last five years.

“He’s my husband,” Octavia finally says, lacing her fingers through his.

If Bellamy intends to protest, he doesn’t. He just nods, asks them to continue the tour, but he turns to Clarke when they’re alone at the end of the day. Their house isn’t suited to living anymore and so they are staying with Lincoln and Octavia until they figure out what to do next. It seems petty and pointless, everything but being with Bellamy, but people are looking up to Clarke – looking for her. She never once denied anyone in dire need of help and now they trust her.

“Is she happy with him?”

Bellamy is curled around Clarke, warm and solid and tangible at last. Her body knows him, knows where his hands fit (around her waist), where his lips fit (on the base of her neck), where he was and where he should forever be (everywhere around her). His beard is gone and he reminds her of what he was before the war but it’s different. His eyes are still heavy with things he’d seen and she wishes she could help him carry it, but she can’t.

The boy she fell in love with is still there somewhere, but he’s changed. She still loves him, loves him like he’s a radiant sun and she hadn’t seen the light of the day in a long, long while – loves him because she doesn’t know what else is there to do. Loves him because there is no compromise, no choice, not when it’s the only thing she wants.

“Yes,” she tells him, proud and happy. Octavia asked her for her blessing because Bellamy wasn’t there and it humbled her. Made her feel smaller and bigger at the same time.

She always loved Octavia but during the war she found a friend and a companion in the girl – someone who knew how hard it was to get up in the morning, hopeless, and search for that elusive feeling that keeps you going every single day – even when there was nothing but grey skies and charred clothing on the streets.

They shared their pain and what little happiness they could find.

“Yes,” Clarke repeats, a smile tugging on her lips. “Yes, she is. Lincoln is a good man, you shouldn’t be worried about him.”

“I’m not,” Bellamy says. “I can see the way he looks at her.”

“Like she puts the stars in the sky, yes,” Clarke confirms, the tiniest chuckle bursting from her lips. That seems to startle them both. Clarke wonders when the last time he’d laughed was. Was there any place for laughter, even the desperate kind, in the trenches?

She doesn’t ask him, only kisses him again. Their bones are aching, their souls are weary and both of them forgot what it was like to just live but, for now, this is enough. Bellamy next to her is enough.

 

* * *

 

Clarke relearns Bellamy in the months that come. He is the same, but he is different – something she’s reminded of every time it feels completely normal to surprise him by wrapping her hands around him, leaning her cheek on his back and he recoils. She feels like she should be making sure steps but she grows hesitant and careful around him. Every time someone mentions the war, there are plates clattering to the floor if he’s holding them and she hates the red in his cheeks, like he thinks that this is somehow shameful.

It is not.

She hates her mother, hates everyone responsible for doing this to him. He is raw and wounded, much deeper than what she can see in scars that are starting to fade away. Sometimes she brushes her fingertips along them, his skin slick with sweat of proving how much he’d missed her, and he jerks away. His lips are soft on her knuckles, but his eyes beg her not to touch the scars.

He is broken, she finally realizes as their bed starts shaking in the early morning hours. The nightmares don’t let him sleep for more than a few hours and she doesn’t want to sleep if that means leaving him alone with his thoughts.

“Sssh,” she whispers, carding her fingers through his hair as he slowly comes to. “It’s alright, I’m here, I’m right here, Bell.”

His eyes remind her of the men who came to the house, spread wide and full of terror, but they’re the ones that survived. There is still enough fight in him and that’s what keep her going. He hasn’t given up and he could have.

Some days are harder than others. There are mornings when she can’t stay with him because Octavia and Lincoln deserve a break and so she makes her way to the house, people still waiting in a line in front of the door. Her mother begged her to drop it now that the war is over but there are still people who need her help and she’ll be there as long as there’s a need for her.

Those mornings she just tries not to think about his trembling body, clammy forehead and eyes squeezed shut like it’s going to will the thoughts away. They don’t talk about what happened to him and perhaps that’s not healthy but she sees the pain in his eyes when someone mentions it and she doesn’t want to make it worse.

However, there are good days when he wakes her up with lazy, languid kisses and they laugh like nothing ever happened. There’s still blood on their hands and granite woven into their bones but they allow themselves to forget. They laugh and knock shoulders as they make their way into the kitchen, Lincoln and Octavia smirking when they see Clarke in his shirt, careless of what she looks like, suddenly young again.

She is twenty-five and he is twenty-seven but most of the time they feel like they are already old enough to die. They’ve seen enough, they’ve seen too much and their bones ache for rest.

But on the mornings when sun filters in through the kitchen window and the scent of coffee is thick in the air, Lincoln reads out the jokes in the morning paper and they all laugh. They share their misery and their relief around that kitchen table, the good and the bad, while trying to find out how exactly they should continue their lives after the war.

Bellamy talks to Lincoln sometimes, Clarke knows. She sees them and she is relieved. She can’t understand what it feels like to take a life so you could keep yours, can’t understand what it’s like sleeping in the rain and the cold. She wants to but she can’t. Not like Lincoln can. The two men become what Clarke and Octavia became when they only had each other and their pain.

He doesn’t speak of the war until she’s bandaging his knuckles after he hit a wall in their bedroom. She was aware of what was going on, the violent jerk of his body, feet thudding on the floor and then the sound of bones breaking, but it hurts. It hurts seeing his pain raw and unguarded in his face, how tired his eyes are when she sets the bones and cleans the blood with her shirt. It hurts to see him like that but it hurts even more when she can’t do anything to help him.

“I’m a monster,” he finally says, and it sounds so tired and weak that Clarke wants to destroy the world for allowing this to happen. To have Bellamy, the man who was once a boy who always had spare change and a smile on his face for whoever needed it, to grow into a man who thinks he’s a monster makes her want to set the whole world ablaze just because he is innocent and they turned him into someone who thinks that the blood on his hands is his fault.

“You’re not,” she presses out, shaking her head. It takes her a minute to finish up and then there’s clean bandages around his right hand and she brings his knuckles to her lips. “Bellamy, you’re not a monster.”

She sets his hand down on her thigh and thinks about how much he smells of war and surviving when he shakes his head at someone’s offer of alcohol, when his muscles tense because he doesn’t want to hurt her and he can’t control himself anymore. She thinks about how unfair that is, and how the word unfair sounds too light for what they’ve been put through.

There’s a stray curl falling into his eyes and she brushes it away with her thumb, cupping his cheek. He looks weighed down by the guilt that he shouldn’t be feeling and she loves him so much.

“Clarke, I’ve killed people. I- I can’t un-see that. It’s what I did and-“

He’s choking on every breath he takes, averts his gaze that constantly searches for something, anything. He was found but he is still lost.

“You did what you had to do to survive. That is not who you are, Bellamy.”

“It is. _I_ did those things,” he protests, voice laced with anger. “And now that I’m back I can’t give you the husband you should have, I can’t – I’m a monster and I am weak. How long until you get tired of me, like I’m tired of myself? I can’t do anything and you have to do all the work, the clinic – day and night you’re there while your husband sits home and what – trembles?”

“Bellamy, stop that. You want forgiveness? Fine, I’ll give that to you. You’re forgiven.”

“Clarke-“

“No, don’t. Because this war wasn’t your fault and the blood isn’t on your hands. What were you supposed to do, get killed? You had to survive. You had to survive so you could come back home to me and Octavia. And I will never, never get tired of you. You are not weak – you’ve been through horrible things but you know what?”

He looks at her, something inexplicable in his gaze – something like hope and despair at the same time. It’s still him. He is rougher and more tired but he is still Bellamy. She still loves him so much her heart threatens to burst and swallow the whole world.

“You survived,” she says. “You survived and you are still doing it. And I’ll be right here. Always. That’s what we said, right? Always. I love you, Bellamy, and I won’t ever give up.”

She thinks that he didn’t come home until she’s said that.

There is more light in his eyes after that. The days in which he can’t get up in the morning still happen but not so often. The world buries its dead, the newspapers are filled with titles asking for the reason behind the war and behind so many loved ones lost, but children are born every day and people still fall in love – life goes on.

The progress is there, in laughter Clarke hears when she goes back home at the end of the day – pubs lit up, people milling in the streets, children smiling at her as she passes by – “Look, mummy, a nurse”.

Abby visits the clinic from time to time, makes it official, helps with the paperwork and now they are even making actual money. It’s her way of apologizing but Clarke can’t forgive her, knowing that her mother is one of those who decided to start this pointless war. Bellamy forgives her sooner than Clarke can but he doesn’t explain, just lets her into the clinic and takes her on a tour.

“This is amazing, Clarke,” she finally says.

The hypocrisy is not lost on Clarke but she lets it slide, accepts her mother’s help even if she doesn’t accept the invitations for dinners and banquets.

Bellamy follows Clarke around the clinic, nodding solemnly as she explains to him how things work, and she knows that he wasn’t made for this sort of thing – patching people up and medicine in general but he tries, gets better at it. His words could have started a revolution back in the day but these days he seems content to use them for comforting people who don’t know what to do with themselves after the tragedies they’ve been through.

They’ve been in a state of perpetual chaos for a very long time, holding their breaths and living their lives on a pause – waiting for a better day, and they just don’t know what to do now. How do you return to normal if you can’t even remember it?

They take baby steps and soon enough the good days outweigh the bad. Summer returns to their city and they walk around, hand in hand, as buildings are raised from the rubble and children laugh in the streets. Their souls will know war, but they will know peace as well.

It is impossible to forget charred fingertips, teddy bears discarded in a desperate run to a shelter, the smell of rust clinging to everyone’s skin. There is no oblivion that could erase it. But there is a future, bright and promising. And for now, that is enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thanks to [lushatrocity](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lushatrocity/pseuds/lushatrocity) who is the one responsible for me writing this. I hope it fulfilled at least some of your expectations. 
> 
> If you liked this, please remember the dynamic duo: kudos and comments - those are my faves and I love hearing what you think about my stuff! Thank you for taking the time to read and I hope you liked it! :)
> 
> ps. if you wanna hang out with me I'm right [here](http://marauders-groupie.tumblr.com) and i can totally be talked into all sorts of things, including prompts and writing for five hours in a row.


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